Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Staunton, December 31 – By imposing
a monopoly on Russia’s information space, Vladimir Putin and his regime risk
falling into the trap that leaders at the end of the Soviet period complained
about: “their ears hear one thing but their eyes see something else,” a
development that was fatal for the USSR and could be for Putin’s Russia as
well, Stepan Sulakshin says.

Sulakshin, head of the Moscow Center
for Scientific Political Thought and Ideology, says that “information war is a
prerogative of the state [but] an absolute monopoly in the media leads to
degradation and decay” and “propaganda which goes beyond rationality and
expediency” (newdaynews.ru/propaganda/522198.html).

Moscow today,
like other governments, is telling itself that it has the right to impose such
a monopoly because of the war in Ukraine, but that argument, the analyst says,
missed the point that “war is not something that happens every day” and that the
greater control the regime has over the media, the more likely it will not know
what is really happening and not be able to avoid decay.

Many commentators
have warned, Sulakshin says, that the government’s control of the media is
leading to the zombification of the population, but they have paid less
attention to the ways in which it is leading at the same time and for the same
reasons to an elite which believes its own propaganda.

In that
situation, he argues, “if the blind are leading the blind, then it is well
known to which cemetery they will come as a result.”

Any government
has a right to put its message out via the media, Sulakshin says, but it must
be careful not to destroy the media as a source of genuine information and
feedback by going too far and setting up a monopoly. When that happens, the
authorities typically explicit their possibilities, do not get a critical
response, and lose their way.

A vicious circle
emerges, Sulakshin says. “The more stupid and mistakenly the authorities act,
the more harm their actions inflict on the country … the more efforts the state
media spend on explaining such measures as the most intelligence, wise,
necessary and positive for the country.”Those sending the message believe it as much as those to whom it is
directed.

And it is
entirely possible, Sulakshin says, that the audience will wake up to the fraud
even sooner than the elite. That is because “the population sooner or later
will understand” that the regime’s claim that 85 percent” of Russians support
it is implausible given the problems and that that in turn means “our state
organism, including its information part is also seriously ill.”

Staunton, December 31 – In its
handling of the Navalny case, the Kremlin has shown how it uses “the appearance
of legality” to cover what has become “the illegality” of the Russian legal
system and thus is important as a marker of the broader and complete
degradation of that system, according to Ella Paneyakh.

The number of violations of law and
legal practice in this case, Paneyakh says, is staggering: Under normal
procedure, neither brother would have been sentenced to jail after the Yve
Rocher company denied that it had suffered damages, and the bother (Aleksey)
who was already under suspended sentence would have been sent to jail.

Moreover, there were other problems.
On the one hand, the court simply ignored regular order and issued a decision without
reading the text and in effect took a hostage.And on the other, the sentences, which violate that order, very much appear
to be have the result of telephone justice, of phone calls from above directing
the judge what to say and when.

It is important to recognize that
what happened to the Navalny brothers is simply “the result of what has
happened in the [Russian] criminal justice system in recent years.”The situation is now so bad that the
authorities no longer feel any need to “veil” political cases with legal
niceties and assume they can cover everything with “television propaganda.

The sentences in this case, she
continues, represent “a completely new level of legal arbitrariness even in
comparison with what has been done” in the past.The entire system is shown to have nothing to
do with law, and as a result, it is likely that soon not only the Kremlin but “every
regional princeling” will protect himself by dictating “judicial” outcomes.

What happened, of course, was
preceded by a series of steps away from law and judicial practice as they had
been understood. First, the Russian authorities introduced the widespread use
of “criminal intent” to force the verdicts they wanted. Then, they employed a
Soviet-like elasticity in applying specific codes to get the “correct”
outcomes.

And then, as these things were accepted as the
way business is now being done, the authorities simply invoked precedent to do
even more, the sociologist writes. “As a result, the legalization of illegal
practice has been able to penetrate even into law itself.”

Society, of course, “at each
stage had the chance to respond and protest such changes” and thus stop this
gutting of law and court procedure. But in all too many cases, the Russian
people did nothing and simply accepted what the authorities have done. The
Navalny case may change that, but far more protests will be needed.

If they are not forthcoming and if
the authorities do not back away from what they have done to the brothers
Navalny, then it will be time to speak about something that might be described
as the death of law and judicial independence in Putin’s Russia. In that event,
everyone is at risk.

Staunton, December 31 – Tomorrow is
the 15th anniversary of Boris Yeltsin’s New Year’s gift to the
Russian people – Vladimir Putin as their ruler – a man who was not the servant
of the oligarchs as some had expected but rather a willful leader who has made
the last decade a half into his own “era.”

But it is now clear that whatever
Russians believe he has done for their country now, the longer Putin remains in
office, Yaroslav Butakov argues in a commentary on Rufabula.com today, the more
disastrous things will become the consequences for Russia and the Russian
people (rufabula.com/articles/2014/12/31/putin-retrospective).

The reasons for that conclusion, the
historian says, are to be found in the personality of the man who has become
the ruler of Russia.Putin has shown
himself to be increasingly inadequate in providing answers to the questions
that his own actions are causing to be raised, and he is sacrificing the interests
of the country in the name of maintaining his own power.

It is quite possible, Butakov says,
that Putin is suffering from an emotional problem which means that “the chief
goal of his political acts is personal self-assertion.” Such an individual
needs “extraordinary circumstances where he can display his qualities as ‘a
savior’” and win plaudits for doing so regardless of the consequences.

“An authoritarian ruler is always
put forward by a ruling class,” the historian points out, “but having become
such, the ruler begins to ‘build’ a ruling class” that will support him and his
projects. Consensus on this point, of course, can ultimately be “destroyed by
the actions” of the ruler himself.

“Disagreement at the top is a
necessary factor of any revolution, for a consolidated ruling class always is
capable of putting down any dissatisfaction coming only from below,” Butakov
says. “Only groups in the elite itself who are dissatisfied [will be] capable
of pulling down the regime,” he says.

“However paradoxical” it may seem,
the analyst continues, “the very sharpest intra-elite conflict in Russia after
1993 preceded the ascent of Putin to the Olympus of power.”That was the fight between Putin and Luzhkov
in 1999. It was “a real ‘crisis of the people at the top.’” And it arose over
what to do about Chechnya.

That struggle featured themes that
are once again surfacing. Indeed, Butakov argues, “there is nothing new in
principle in this connection” in 2014, although there are some minor variations
because of the experience of 15 years ago and the inertia of some of the
participants who have learned nothing and forgotten nothing from that time.

Compared with 1999, the situation
Putin finds himself in today appears “particularly firm,” but “is that so in
reality?” Butakov asks. In fact, “the lack of a definite intra-elite opposition
is the result, above all, of the negative selection of cadres” by Putin, of his
driving out of all “independently thinking personalities” be they Kasyanov or
Illarionov.

“The elite as a whole needs an
executor, but the leader for his part needs around him only executors” of his
will,” he says. “No one must interfere with his plans to pay the single ‘savior’”
of the situation.” Over time, Butakov argues, “this dilemma can become
irresolvable.” The real question is: “has that time come?”

It is still not clear how groups
within the elite are reacting to what has changed in their worlds thanks to
Putin’s policies. But to the extent that they do become convinced that he
threatens their interests, their opposition will first occur behind the scenes
and then “provoke a domino effect for the entire political system of ‘enlightened
authoritarianism.’”

How much longer the Putin era will
last remains unclear, Butakov says. But “the Russian Federation as ‘the legal
successor of the USSR’ or some kind of ‘USSR 2.0’ has turned out to be a failed
and lifeless project.” And Putin’s efforts to play a role “exceeding the
capacity of the country” are only leading Russia to collapse much faster than
would otherwise be the case.

Consequently, on this New Year’s
Eve, Russian must recognize that the longer Putin remains in office and
conducts the policies he is promoting now, “the more catastrophic the
consequences” will be for everyone concerned.

One can only hope, Butakov
concludes, “that a year from now, our New Year’s television picture will look
different than it does today.”

Staunton, December 31 – If as some
are suggesting 2015 is going to be the year of Aleksey Navalny just as the past
years have been those of Vladimir Putin, then it is extremely important that
the opposition leader clearly state his positions lest Russians find in his
case that they have given the power to someone who will take Russia again in an
unwelcome direction.

One area where Navalny has been less
than clear about his positions concerns Moscow’s relations with Russia’s
regions and Russia’s neighbors – indeed, he has been criticized in the past for
playing up to nationalist groups – and that makes it especially important that
he be quite specific about his intentions in that regard.

Vadim Shteppa, a regionalist
analyst, says that “like all normal people [he] is glad that Aleksey was not
put in prison and is angry that his brother Oleg was.” But he suggests that “if
Aleksey would study Russian history a little more closely, he would understand
that this is the work of the same imperialist matrix” of the past (http://rufabula.com/author/shtepa/256).

The analyst thus asks that Navalny
give short and clear answers to three questions:

*** “Should Russia be a federation or an empire?”

*** “If a federation, then on what model should it be built? Will it be an agreement of sovereign regions or the same Kremlin ‘vertical’ but only with [Navalny] instead of Putin?”

*** “Do you [Aleksey Navalny] recognize Ukraine and the other post-Soviet countries are genuinely independent – or do you dream about the remake of the Russian Empire?”

Given how angry many Russians are now at
Putin and his crimes against the Russian people and Russia’s neighbors, it is
all too easy to assume that almost anyone would be an improvement. And while
that may be true in many respects, it is not the case in all, and those
supporting anyone to replace the Kremlin dictator deserve to know just what
they are backing.

Staunton, December 31 – At a time
when the Kremlin is closing Russian hospitals, cutting teachers’ pay, reducing
pensions, and not building roads, Vladimir Putin spent more than 160 billion US
dollars on his two megaprojects of 2014 – the Winter Olympics in subtropical
Sochi and the invasion of Ukraine.

That works out to about 1200 US
dollars or 60,000 rubles for every man, woman and child in the Russian
Federation, an immediate direct cost on each of them and one that does not
include the loss of intangible rights and the future loss of even more of both
the longer Putin stays in the Kremlin.

According to Illarionov, a Russian
analyst now at Washington’s CATO Institute, “the loss of 111 billion dollars of
reserves in this year is not the result of Western sanctions but is the result
of the political decisions of Mr. Putin and the illiterate actions of the
Central Bank.” And it is “no small sum,” being 2.5 times what was spent in
Sochi.

While many Russians likely felt at
the time that the Sochi Games were worth the price, even with all the
corruption they entailed, ever fewer do given that whatever bounce in
international standing that international competition gave the country was
almost immediately irretrievably lost by Putin’s Anschluss of Crimea and his
continuing aggression in the Donbas.

There are far more compelling moral
reasons to oppose the actions of the last dictator in Europe – and it is Putin
even more than Belarus’s Alyaksandr Lukashenka – both in suppressing his own
people and unleashing war against his neighbors and the world. But it is often
the case that nations turn against their leaders
because the geopolitical projects of the latter cost too much.

Over the last 12 months, Putin has
imposed an enormous burden on the people of Russia, something ever more of them
are certainly aware of and oppose. And in the next 12 months or even sooner,
their awareness and opposition of this tragic waste of resources by a country
that can ill afford such things will, one hopes on this New Year’s Eve, be the
basis for change.

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Staunton, December 30 – Four Moscow
commentators with close ties to the Russian security services say that the
Ukrainian special services are preparing to conduct terrorist actions and other
“diversions” inside the Russian Federation, a charge that will dramatically
increase tensions and may be presage Russian diversions that Moscow will blame
on Ukrainians.

On the Versiya.ru portal, Ruslan
Gorevoy presents such evidence as he says he has gathered on this issue and
then surveys the opinions of Sergey Goncharov, head of the Alfa Group veterans
organization, Aleksandr Mikhailov, a former FSB officer, Viktor Myasnikov, a spetsnaz veteran, and Nikolay
Dimlevich, a high technology analyst, about it (versia.ru/articles/2014/dec/29/vzryv_bratskoy_lubvi).

Gorevoy begins by referring to the
statement of Andrey Levus, a deputy in Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada, a few days ago
that Ukraine’s SBU is preparing terrorist acts in Russia and has spent some 50
million US dollars on that project.His
comments are hardly the only indication of this possibility, however, the
Versiya.ru writer says.

Former Ukrainian defense minister
Anatoly Gritsenko and Verkhovna Rada deputy Dmitry Yarosh have said much the
same thing, Gorevoy continues. And it is very likely that the case against SBU
head Valentina Nalivaychenko will soon feature charges about this crime as
well.

Gorevoy suggests that the Ukrainian
special forces are already making use of anti-Moscow Chechens and Crimean
Tatars, and he cites Moscow political analyst Lev Voroshilin’s comment that he
has “no doubts in the inevitability” of terrorist actions by these people against
Russia.

Kyiv is also planning to make use of
ethnic Ukrainians in the Russian Federation regardless of whether they are
Russian citizens, migrant workers, or refugees, and it is “preparing terrorists
out of ethnic Russians and citizens of the Russian Federation” as well, Gorevoy
says.

Vershilin says that “the conclusions
are obvious.” Ukraine is preparing to launch “a terrorist war against Russia on
its territory.” Anyone who “closes his eyes to this fact” is behaving in an
irresponsible manner because a state that uses terrorists is a terrorist state,
“although not from the point of view of the West, where terrorism directed
against Russia isn’t terrorism.”

The four specialists Gorevoy spoke
with were unanimous that Ukraine would almost certainly like to engage in such
actions, but they expressed varying degrees of skepticism about Kyiv’s ability
to do so.

Goncharov said that at present, the
only group Ukraine has which could carry out such tasks is the SBU’s Alfa unit.
It was created in Soviet times, the veteran says, “and we know that it has the
potential” to do so. But Ukraine has only a handful of such people, and
building up the requisite staff is “a question of more than one year.”

Mikhailov said the presence of a
large number of Ukrainian refugees in Russia means that the potential for such
diversionary attacks “theoretically” exists, but he said that “in order to
carry them out, [Kyiv] needs not only people but also money and corresponding
bases on the territory of Russia.” All of that is expensive, and it isn’t clear
whether Kyiv has the resources.

Myasnikov said that “it is obvious that
Kyiv wants to create a group” to eliminate opponents of the Ukrainian government
if for nothing else.But even that is no
easy thing to carry out.And Dimlevich
noted that the Russian security agencies would be very alert to such a
possibility and do everything necessary to block it.

Staunton, December 30 – Central Asian
gastarbeiters are introducing and spreading Islamist radicalism in many parts
of the Russian Federation, and Moscow needs to take some extraordinary
immediate measures or risk losing effective control over portions of the
country, according to Rais Suleymanov.

The APN.ru portal this week has
posted Suleymanov’s article, “Migrants and Their Role in the dissemination of
Radical Trends of Islam in Russia” from a collection of essays, “Ideological
Opposition to Ethno-Religious Terrorism in Contemporary Russia” (in Russian;
Saransk, 2014, pp. 65-94) (apn.ru/publications/article32901.htm).

In this 8,000-word and heavily
footnoted article, Suleymanov, a Kazan scholar who works for the influential
Russian Institute for Strategic Studies and has been a frequent critic of Muslim
leaders and Muslim republics, provides details on what he says is the threat
that immigrant workers now pose.

Suleymanov notes that many people
think of migrant workers only as a source of crime, but the real threat they
pose is as “bearers of radical trends in Islam.” Such people are now so
numerous in many places that Russia may soon face “a situation when our
villages will gradually be transformed into Central Asian kishlaks.”

Moreover and still worse, Russia
will soon find itself in a situation like the one France faces with Arabs: the rise
of a second generation of immigrants born in Russia who combine the worst of
all possible worlds: a commitment to Islamist values and the expectation arising
from their Russian citizenship that they will nonetheless be treated with
deference by the authorities.

But
most immediately, Suleymanov says, “the main danger” the gastarbeiters pose is
that they are carrying out agitation and propaganda among Russia’s own
indigenous Muslims and recruiting them as their allies in the struggle for the
realization of their own radical Islamist goals.

To
meet these challenges, the RISI commentator offers six recommendations to the
Russian government.First, he says,
Moscow must expand its cooperation with the special services of the Central
Asian countries in order to gain their help in identifying and then blocking
radicals from coming into Russia.

Second,
the Russian government needs to train and hire specialists on Islamist
movements who can help the Federal Migrant Service identify and weed out the
radicals.

Third,
Moscow needs to draw on the expertise of Russia’s own Muslims and make imams
and mullahs responsible for monitoring and then countering Islamist radical
propaganda on the territory of their parishes.

Fourth,
Moscow must “mobilize all government organs” to block “the colonization of
rural population points by migrants, the formation by them of ethnic quarters
in cities, and the active settlement of entire cities in the Far North.”If it doesn’t, these will become centers for
the spread of Islamist radicalism throughout the country.

Fifth,
Moscow must toughen its laws on religious extremism. Currently, according to
Suleymanov, they are “extremely soft.” Indeed, he says, one of the reasons
Islamist radicals come from Central Asian countries to Russia is that the laws
against extremist are much tougher in their homelands than in the Russian
Federation.

And sixth, he concludes saying this
is “the main thing,” Moscow must take radical steps to fight illegal
immigration. Unless it gets that under control, Suleymanov says, it will be extremely
difficult if not outright impossible for Moscow to prevent immigration from
becoming a source of the destabilization of Russia.

Staunton, December 30 – Former Ukrainian
President Leonid Kravchuk and former Prime Minister Yevgeny Marchuk have formed
a new group to press Kyiv to apply now for membership in the Western alliance,
a step that is possible now that the Verkhovna Rada has voted to end Ukraine’s
policy of non-alignment.

That action, Kravchuk and Marchuk
say, “requires that the Ukrainian authorities immediately restore the Euro-Atlantic
foreign policy course, apply for membership in NATO, and conduct an
all-Ukrainian referendum in support of the membership of Ukraine” in the Western
alliance (itar-tass.com/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/1678363).

In addition to Kravchuk and Marchuk,
the initiative group for the formation of a Ukraine in NATO movement includes
the poet Dmitry Pavlychko, former foreign minister Vladimir Ogryzko, formerHague tribunal judge Vladimir Vasilenko,
former Verkhovna Rada deputy Ivan Zayats, and former ecology minister Yury
Shcherbak.

The group plans to set up branches
in all cities and villages of Ukraine and to collect signatures to press for a
referendum as soon as possible.But the
group’s leaders are under no illusions that the way forward will be necessarily
easy or quick.

Marchuk pointed out at the press
conference yesterday that “the procedure of joining NATO is quite complicated,
both technically and in terms of the demands” the alliance places on potential
members. Moreover, he pointed out, “not all NATO member countries are inclined
in the direction we would like.”

According to the former prime minister, “Ukraine will only be
able to acquire the status of a country with a NATO Membership Action Plan [MAP] after it holds a referendum. And
consequently, he and his colleagues hope to meet that requirement as soon as
possible. Ogryzko for his part said he hopes it can take place in 2015.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko
has said in the past that he hopes Ukraine will be able to create the
conditions that will allow it to join NATO sometime over the next five to six
years.The new group, fearful of Moscow’s
intentions, clearly wants to advance that timetable in a significant way.

Staunton, December 30 – Most English
speakers now recognize that calling Ukraine “the Ukraine” is insulting, but
Russians remain divided over whether to say “in Ukraine” (“v Ukraine”) or “on
Ukraine” (“na Ukraine”), investing the choice with political meaning because in
the minds of some, the first makes Ukraine a country and the second only a
place.

Oksana Grunchenko, a senior
researcher at the Institute of the Russian Language in the Russian Academy of
Sciences who provides guidance on Russian usage to the media and other
scholars, say that the “v” or “na” issue has become especially heated in the
last year (postnauka.ru/talks/39261).

But she points out that it is not a
new question and that “over the course of many years we have said that in
reality, two forms exist historically: with the preposition ‘v’ and with the
preposition ‘na.’” Pushkin used “v” in his poem “Poltava,” for example, and
thus it is part of Russian literary language.

At the same time, Grunchenko
continues, she and her colleagues “stress that the normative form in
contemporary Russian language which no one has tried or is trying to change is the
form with the preposition ‘na.’” According to the Moscow scholar, “it always
was the case, and until 1993, it didn’t come into the head of anyone to open a
discussion on this issue.”

“But in the process of establishing
Ukrainian statehood,” she says, “this question arose” because Ukrainians live
in their own country but speak Russian and overwhelming use a specific
preposition: “v” and not “na.”

Some scholars in Ukraine even began
to demand that Russians use “v” as well because, “they said” it was important
to “break the link with the offensive analogy ‘on the borderland’ and ‘on
Ukraine.’” Perhaps not surprisingly, this has become a very sensitive issue for
many, and the choice people make says something about their politics.

If someone uses “v,” then they are
being guided “by the principle of political correctness,” but if they use “na,”
then they are being guided by the traditional norms of the Russian language.“It is possible,” Grunchenko says, that doing
the former is a better idea if one is speaking with “residents of a neighboring
state” who feel strongly about this.

Moreover, she points out, the
leaders of the Russian state have used “v” on occasion when relations between
Moscow and Kyiv have been relatively good but then shifted to “na” when
conditions have deteriorated.Over the
last year, “v” has more or less disappeared in Russia, except in expressions
like “’in Ukraine, as they say there.’”

Staunton, December 30 – Unlike Russians
who will call white black one day and then reverse themselves the next, Ukrainians
are on the way to escaping that Orwellian world and are no longer prepared to
make engage in such mental acrobatics to fit into their society, a fundamental shift
which gives hope for Ukraine’s future, according to Igor Klyamkin.

Russians, the senior Russian
commentator points out, become uncomfortable when they are offered “various
points of view relative to the general order of things” and thus are prepared
to go along at least in public with whatever the leadership says is the case
even if this requires accepting as true what was rejected as false (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=54A042072AAC9).

This does not mean that “people do
not have their own senses about what is correct and what is incorrect,”
Klyamkin continues. It simply means that “they do not trust their own senses
very much. They can distinguish black from white when the two are next to them,”
but when they are far off, they aren’t certain and thus follow what those they
assume know better say.

Unfortunately, that in turn means that “the white of today will be
viewed as black tomorrow -- and the reverse as well.” Thus, those who are
called fascists now “will begin to be considered heroes” and so on.Because of their dependence on rulers and TV
commentators, Russians are like soldiers who may get doubtful orders but cannot
doubt them.

They go along, Klyamkin says, not simply out of fear of
punishment, although that can play a role, but out of “a fear of ignorance
about the common interest of the country and the common views of the command.”

In Ukraine, it seems, the situation is different. There,
ideas about what is correct do not always correspond but do come “upwards from
below. Slowly, without complete confidence and with breakdowns, but they have
come.” As a result, Ukrainians are not uncomfortable with what appears to be “anomalous.”

What that means, Klyamkin says, is that Ukrainians have
become citizens rather than soldiers, people with their own ideas who are not
afraid to express them rather than those who keep their mouths shut and await
orders about what to think and what to do.

The reaction of Russians to what has been going on in
Ukraine is “traditionally that of soldiers,” of a society that awaits orders
rather than one that thinks for itself. That is why the Russian analyst says
today, almost his only hope is that Ukraine will succeed in making this
transition from an Orwellian world complete.

“2014 was in European history [Ukraine’s] year,” Klyamkin
concludes. “Let the same be true in 2015.”

Monday, December 29, 2014

Staunton,
December 29 – Ukraine’s blockade of Ukraine and Moscow’s reaction to it show
that “Crimea has not become part of Russia” however much Vladimir Putin and his
propagandists repeat that “Crimea is Ours.” It isn’t because if it were,
Ukraine and Russia would both be behaving differently, according to Oleg
Kashin.

But
that word is not part of “the lexicon of Russian propaganda” now, and it isn’t
because however much Moscow insists that Crimea is part of Russia, the reality
today is that it is not, that it remains foreign territory.If that were not the case, neither Russia nor
Ukraine would be acting as they are.

At
the present time, “two million Russians are blockaded on a cold peninsula,”
Kashin says. No trains or cars can reach them from the outside, no one can
count on regular electricity, and no one has any confidence that Moscow will
ever build the bridge it has promised to construct to link the peninsula to
Russia.

“’Crimea is Ours’—the victorious slogan of
this spring – has been sounded so often that it has become an anecdote” or even
“something ominous.”“Our – and this
means a humanitarian catastrophe on the edge of which it now balances is also ours,
and responsibility for it lies with the Russian Federation.”

“If Crimea is Ukrainian, then
everything is even worse,” the Russian commentator says. “For Ukraine, the
peninsula is a territory temporarily occupied by Russia, a source of a
territorial dispute and of big losses. The people of Ukraine in this view are
unhappy Ukrainian citizens who in spite of their will are being held under the
power of the Russian state.”

Kyiv is punishing Crimea and its
population with its blockade, but instead of helping the peninsula and its
people, Moscow is helping Ukraine by supplying coal and ignoring the needs of a
place and a population which its leaders regularly insist are part of the
Russian Federation. This might be laughable if it weren’t so serious, he
implies.

“The annexation of Crimea in the
course of the entire year was the occasion for the harshest criticism of
Vladimir Putin from his various opponents in Russia and abroad,” Kashin
says.The Kremlin leader “has been
accused of imperialism, expansionism, of dangerous geopolitical games and much
else.”

“The last days of the year
demonstrate the baselessness of all these accusations,” the Russian commentator
says.

“Imperialists do not conduct themselves
in this way. Put was and remains the leader of a money-centric authoritarian
regime for whom the fate of two million
people on the peninsula is nothing more than an occasion for virtual political
games, and when these games come into contact with some reality, it turns out
that Putin isn’t involved with the people or the peninsula.”

Putin’s press secretary says what the Kremlin leader has
been doing is “a consistent demonstration” of his political will, but there is
nothing consistent about Putin’s actions in Ukraine. He has come up with four
different explanations for why he sought the unification of Crimea with Russia,
each in response to the situation of the time when he offered it.

In reality, Kashin concludes, “Russia did not unite
Crimea to itself; [instead], Russia pretended that Crimea became part of it.”
That allowed for a propaganda campaign, and the immediate political goals of
its author were achieved. But now Moscow has “no truck” with Crimea and its
people.

That, the Moscow commentator says, is how “Russian
imperialism and expansionism look in the 21st century” and it is why
Crimea is “ours” only for those who believe in propaganda.

Staunton,
December 28 – Just as Poles were able to exploit the collapse of the Russian
state a century ago to become independent countries and part of Europe, so too
now Ukraine has the chance to exploit another round of the collapse of the
Russian imperial project and become “the Poland of the 21st
century,” according to Vitaly Portnikov.

First,
they must recognize that “the main challenges of 2014” despite the dizzying
events of the last months “not only have not been overcome but on the contrary
are becoming the main content of [Ukrainian] life and the life of the world
surrounding us” for the coming year and possibly years.

Second,
they must understand that they now find themselves in a situation much as the
Poles and Finns did a century ago when the Russian Empire experienced a failed
revolution, a patriotic boom, a collapse into despair in the course of a war,
and a revolution that allowed some but now all of its parts to escape.

And
third, and most important, Ukrainians must face the fact that “now everything
depends on us and only on us. The occupiers may commit diversions, think up new
adventures, and impose dangerous deals but all this in no way will be able to
change either our choice or our future.”

As
amazing as the events of 2014 have been, Portnikov argues, it seems destined to
become “only a shocking prelude to real changes” in 2015 or even later given
the ways in which Ukraine “has become the generator of a cycle of imperial
modernization which the Russian Empire experienced already a century ago.”

Ukrainians should remember that “the first
clear push to changes in Russia then was the 1905 revolution, whose
participants demanded the democratization of the country” and whose energy
derived in the first instance from the non-Russian borderlands and only later
the Russian provinces, just as appears to be the case in the Russian Federation
today.

“The
increasingly harsh policies of the [Russian] regime in both cases led to the
intensification of the inadequateness of the first person [in the state], the
artificial selection of idiots and fools in power, and a complete lack of
understanding by them of the logic of the development of economic and political
processes in the contemporary world.”

Ukraine’s
Maidan and the ensuing events only add to these parallels, Portnikov says. In
many ways, they can be “compared with the shooting” of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
in Sarayevo in 1914.Both then and now,
Russia wanted the course of events that followed “considering that this untied
its hands,” a position that was idiotic but reflected that in both it was made
by idiots.

“The
single chance for preserving the Russian regime in 1914,” Portnikov argues,
required that the regime engage in economic reforms “and careful
democratization. But Petersburg wanted to take part in a war for the
re-division of the world” even though it had no understanding of its lack of
capacity to do so successfully.

As
Portnikov says, “at the end of 1914, patriotism and enthusiasm in the Russian
Empire were at the highest pitch, the year seemed a turning point, and the coming
year victorious and happy.” But then these feelings dissipated in
disappointment. Now, at the end of 2014, Russian emotions have been on an even
more rapid rollercoaster ride up and then down.

At
the end of this year, he continues, “Russia society is both demoralized and confused,
but the chief disappointments, the nightmares of 1915-1916 are still ahead” for
them. And only the future will tell whether this will be a democratic February
or a tragic October, “the disintegration of Russia and civil war” and exactly
when these events will happen.

“What
does this mean for Ukraine?” Portnikov asks rhetorically. Before the Maidan,
Ukraine “remained part of the empire in the form of an economic protectorate
with an imitation of an independent state.” But now “the fate of ‘the Kingdom
of Poland or ‘the Grand Duchy of Finland’ awaits us” if Ukrainians use “the
collapse of the metropolitan center and forever become part of the European
world.”

Ukrainians
“will enter the world without Russia. And next year, this will be finally understood
even by the Russians themselves.” That is “the main result of 2014.”

But
history isn’t endingwith the last days
of this year, Portnikov says, and just as with Poland after 1917, Ukrainian
faces a future filled “with all the ensuring consequences” of its decision. “Now,”
the commentator says, “everything depends on us and only on us.”

If Ukraine
makes its Western choice stick, he suggests, in a few years, people will ask “who
was Lenin?” rather than conclude that his statues must come down.

But
if Ukraine doesn’t make its decision to join Europe stick, then Ukrainians will
remain hanging “between the civilized world and the disintegrating
pseudo-empire, having neither the will to go forward nor the desire to go back
to the past.”

Staunton,
December 29 – A group of Duma deputies wants to restore the “Hero Mother” award
with all its accompanying benefits in order to boost the birthrate in Russia
and help solve that country’s demographic problems, but the Russian government
is worried about the potential cost of doing so and, while not opposed, is
seeking to keep it as inexpensive as possible.

The
Soviet government created the award “Hero Mother” in 1944 which came with a
variety of benefits to encourage Soviet families to have more children. Over
the next 47 years, some 431,000 women in the USSR were given this status on the
birth of their tenth child, Yury Alekseyev writes (stoletie.ru/obschestvo/vspomnili_i_o_materah-geroinah_931.htm).

But
with the end of the USSR, this program lapsed, even though it had played a
valuable role demographically, the Russian commentator suggests. Finally in
2008, faced with population declines, Moscow created a new award, that of “Parental
Glory,” which recognized not just mothers but both parents.

The
new award did not come with any significant benefits and was hard to get: those
who qualified had to collect an enormous number of documents and face endless
lines. As a result, over the last six years, only 218 couples have received it.
(Some regions, Alekseyev notes, supplemented this award with benefits, but the
Russian government as a whole did not.)

Now, a group of Duma
deputies have offered a draft bill that would restore the status of Hero Mother
and provide more benefits to those who are awarded it, but they face opposition
from the government because of what many officials say are the potentially high
costs of such a program.

Initially, the deputies wanted to give the status and
benefits to any woman who had given birth to five children, but faced with
government opposition, they have since limited the potential number of Russian
Hero Mothers by limiting the award to those who have given birth to ten
children all of whom are still living at the time of the award.

Government officials have also pushed to cut back on the bill’s
offer of subsidies, housing and education benefits, and especially early
retirement possibilities, Alekseyev says. And the regime’s opposition has been
supplemented by those who feel the award is sexist and that fathers should be
recognized as well.

The deputies have
given ground, but they insist that even if all the benefits the bill calls for
were to be handed out to all the Russian women with ten living children, this
would not be a burden for the state. They suggest it would cost only several
tens of millions of rubles a year, a figure that could be made even less for
Moscow by requiring regions to fund much of it.

According to Alekseyev, if each region had to come up
with 500,000 rubles (10,000 US dollars) a year, that would be no more than many
Russian business managers receive in a month. Given that, how can the
government suggest that such a program is beyond its means?

And as far as pensions are concerned, the costs would be
truly minimal, the authors of the Duma measure insist. That is because the
additional children Hero Mothers would have would pay far more taxes to the state than their
mothers would draw out for early retirement.

As Alekseyev puts it, the real question is whether those
who talk so much about promoting the good of the country are prepared to show “the
political will” necessary to support this measure and actually do so.